The four things people call "the gold price"
| Number | How it is produced | How fresh it can be |
|---|---|---|
| Live spot | A continuous quote from the over-the-counter and futures market | Seconds to minutes. It moves through the trading session. |
| LBMA Gold Price | An auction benchmark run in London, used as a reference price across the trade | Set at the auction, then fixed until the next one |
| Published price tables | Daily, weekly or monthly averages compiled after the fact | As slow as the publisher's schedule. The World Gold Council states its gold price data set is updated weekly. |
| The price on this page | A static build from the last spot fetch, plus an in-browser refresh on each visit | At most an hour old in the HTML; refreshed again in your browser |
The World Gold Council describes gold as having not only a spot price but also the LBMA Gold Price and several regional prices, and it calls the LBMA price an important benchmark across the market. None of those is the same number as the live quote your dealer sees. Data from World Gold Council, gold spot prices.
What this site refreshes, and when
Our own cadence is published in the repository, so you can check it rather than trust it:
- The static HTML is rebuilt every hour at :17 by
.github/workflows/refresh-hourly.yml(cron: '17 * * * *'). That build does not commit to git. - A committed data snapshot is written once a day by
.github/workflows/weekly-refresh.yml(cron: '42 9 * * *', job name "Daily price refresh"). This is the file the history table reads. /live-prices.jsasksapi.gold-api.comfor the current spot when your browser loads a page, and rewrites the figures in place. If that call fails, the server-rendered numbers stay visible.
So the number in the HTML you downloaded can be up to an hour old, and the number in your browser is usually younger than that. Both are real fetched prices with a timestamp attached. Neither is a promise about the next second.
How to tell how old a quote is
Look for a time, not an adjective. "Today's price" with no clock time cannot be checked, and "live" on a page with no timestamp is a decoration. A usable quote carries the moment it was taken and the unit it uses — per troy ounce, per gram, or per pennyweight.
The strip at the top of this page prints the feed time next to the spot figure. The gold price history table prints one row per day, taken from the committed snapshot, which is why it can lag the live quote by hours.
Why the dealer's number still differs from spot
Spot is a wholesale price for pure metal. A buyback offer covers refining, testing, handling and the buyer's margin, and it is struck at whatever spot was when the buyer priced it. Two shops quoting the same minute can still hand you different amounts. The test is the percentage of melt, not the headline spot figure, and you can compute that percentage with the gold calculator.
Read next
- What moves gold prices — the drivers behind the ticks.
- Gold price history — one row per day, with the daily change.
- FAQ — short answers to the questions this page expands on.